Q: When will the market crash?

A: The day after you invest in it.

Until the day you invest the market will continue to rise.  Youwill open the paper every morning to see the Dow-Jones has struck anotherunprecedented record.  You will tell yourself if you had investedyour money in stocks instead of your education, you could have bought yourcollege by now.  But you didnât.  Someone else did.  Youbought a ten to one-hundred-thousand dollar diploma that says, in Latin,"I spent four years reading old books and all I got was this lousy pieceof paper."  Meanwhile the guys who bought computer stocks in the earlynineties have single-handedly driven up inflation, ensuring you will never pay offyour senior year student loans.  In the boxing match of life you have alreadylost round one.
 

Q: Am I the only person in the U.S. who hasnât bought stocks?

A: No, many Americans still have not invested in the stock market. These are mainly cave-dwelling Americans and Americans under seven.

Q: As a non-investor, how will this effect my life?

A: As an increasing number of average citizens invest, the stock market will take up more and more time on the nightly news until important storiessuch as details of the Clippers game and Sarah Michelle Gellarâs vacation to the Bahamas are completely brushed aside.  Whether the market goes up or down the news will continue to feature interviews with leading economists who say the same thing: We have several more years of an Îupâ trend.

Realistically speaking, they say, the market wonât reach a level analogousto its actual worth until the Dow hits 216,000 or Alan Greenspan dies,whichever comes first.  This reassures just about everyone, with thepossible exception of Alan Greenspan, who doesnât appreciate that the entireworld thinks he is a raving worrywart, raining on our parade because hesold his Microsoft shares after Black Monday.

Greenspan prefers to see himself as the next Winston Churchill, yelling at the Neville Chamberlains of Wall Street for appeasing the dictators Dow and Jones.  In 1939 the call was for Îpeace in our time.â  Now itâs Îa pieceâ in our time. And everybody wants one.
 

Youâve read a hundred different stories about two guys who thought upan Internet company in their dorm room freshman year and are now worthtwo-hundred million dollars in stocks,  (At least I have.  Myparents still clip out these articles for me daily) but haveyou heard the story about Michael Tran?

Two years ago Michael was a twenty-two year-old entry-level employeeat computer consulting company.  Though he was a college graduate,he made close to minimum wage.  He decided to use his brand new creditcard÷with an APR of 3.9% for the first six month÷to invest eight-thousanddollars in the stock market.

A month later the Asian markets dropped.  Michaelâs stock plummeted. He sold.  He is now a twenty-four year-old entry-level employee whohappens to be four-thousand dollars in debt.  "The trick is to notget emotional," Michael says.  "If I had held onto my stocks, theywould have tripled by now."  The bad experience has not pulled himaway from the thrill of the market.  He still is looking for a goodinvestment.  "I just bought stock in a company called Play-by-Play,"he explains, "They have the rights to Pokeman, which is really big withthe kids outside the U.S., and itâs catching on here.  A couple ofweeks ago their stock was at a dollar.  Now itâs at six."

Did Michael sextuple his investment?

"No," he says, "I bought it at seven."